The contributions to this volume by Dieter Meindl, Gordon Collier, Elizabeth
Deed Ermath, Jon-K Adams and John Pier originated as papers presented to
the ESSE narratology panel (Debrecen, 1997) convened by Monika Fludernik,
whose paper is also included. There are additional contributions by Martin
Löschnigg, Ansgar F. Nünning, Pierre Gault (a good paper), Manfred
Jahn (one of the best) and Uri Margolin (the best). All the articles are
readable and interesting enough in the questions they address, although
it was often the case that the answers which suggested themselves to me
as I read differed from the answers proposed by the authors. As the editor
John Pier makes clear in the introduction, narratological theories are by
nature given to model-building, and model-builders will certainly find much
to engage their attention in this volume. The models proposed here tend
to be local ones, addressing a given problem of literary expression or a
particular genre. Indeed, several papers suffer in my opinion from the lack
of a comprehensive theoretical framework for the pragmatics of narrative,
for the overall phenomenological structure of narrative and for the general
discursive processes involved in narrative. Such is the case with John Pier's
paper on the dimensions of space in the narrative text: the term "space"
is used in various senses (some of them literal and some metaphorical) which
do not exhaust the possible dimensions of the analysis of space that might
emerge from a more fully worked-out semiotic model of narrative. The models
most authors in this volume propose remain likewise too narrowly conceptualized.

Take, for instance, the discussion in Dieter Meindl, "A Model of
Narrative Discourse along Pronominal Lines," abounding in unwarranted
generalisations. For example, "In structural terms, every character
speech in third-person narrative is a first-person narrative in nuce,
provided the characters make statements about their reality (identical
realms of existence of the enunciator and the enunciated) rather than narrating
a fiction" (1999: 21).There is, obviously enough, a partial
truth contained in this sentence, but the caput mortuum dwindles
the closer we look into it. What if the character speaks "in the third-person"
about another character, not h(er/im)self? What if the speech is an order,
or a description, or any type of non-narrative speech act? Doesn't this
happen in first-person narrative as well?—etc. This kind of imprecision
plagues the writing of several contributors. That is, the individual sentences
work reasonably well in the context of the argument, but quite often they
cannot be relied on for overall conceptual accuracy. Meindl's paper draws
on Benveniste's and Hamburger's theories, which emphasize the contrast between
first person and third person narrative modes. One of the main points of
the paper is that "first-person narrative invites us to entertain the
notion of the (un-)reliability of the enunciating subject, a fictional character".
Meindl uses two pairs of oppositions (particularization/generalization and
concretization/abstraction) to define four narrative movements: comment,
scene, report and metaphor. These modes figure "as theoretical reference
points that narrative discourse can in practice only approach, but never
reach" (18). Meindl then defines the concept of "transposition"
of pronominal reference (narratorial "I", narrateerial [my coinage,
please do not blame Meindl for this!] "you") to another frame
of reference, or another level, understood in Genette or Bal's terms. That
there are many useful elements in the model proposed can easily be granted.
But the notion of level is too mechanically conceived, since for instance
the fictional editors in Gulliver's Travels or Lolita are
considered to introduce additional frames of reference; the specific discourse
acts 'editing' or 'writing a preface', not to speak of their fictional modalities,
are shoehorned into the categories provided by a theory based on verbal
enunciation. The analysis of free indirect discourse often rests here exclusively
on the pronominal frame of reference, obscuring other important issues which
transcend the model being proposed, such as the narrator's evaluation and
attitude. An excessive aprioristic reliance on the (supposed) potentialities
of the pronouns informs much of Meindl's approach, often resulting in sweeping
generalisations. Thus, on the matter of second-person narration, Meindl
holds that "the reader, confronted with one character addressing another
or the self as 'you' and thereby providing a story, finds it easier to conceive
of the addressor as thinking than as speaking". But the addresser may
well be writing, and the issue may well be clear to the reader beforehand
by the use of a letter as a motivating device. Genette's classification
of narrators and his differentiation between voice and perspective also
come in for some criticism, which for the most part I think unjustified.

Martin Löschnigg ("Narratological Categories and the [Non-]distinction
between Factual and Fictional Narratives") draws special attention
to the applicability of discourse-level narratological categories (time,
mode, and voice) to the analysis of historical texts. Formalism here surfaces
in the question "whether we can identify discursive criteria to distinguish
between fictional and factual narratives" (35). Surely those criteria
should be established not at the intratextual level, but in the discourse
protocols which regulate the production and use of fiction and of non-fiction-if
our theory of discourse is aware of the actual circumstances and uses of
speech events and of the disciplinary constraints on discourse, the distinction
between factual and fictional is a given, not a problem to be solved by
stylistic analysis. It may become a pseudo-problem if we try to solve it
on purely formalist or structural terms. (Structural in the narrow sense,
that is-personally I am in favour of a wider interpretation of "structuralism",
one which does not favour structure at the cost of neglecting context and
process, and which takes into account the social systemof communication
as well as of interpretation, not merely what we usually understand as the
'structural' characteristics of texts, defined within a formalist paradigm).
Löschnigg explores some differences in the application of time, mode
and voice. In time, "different patterns are very likely to emerge"
in fiction and nonfiction, although any given temporal structure may appear
in fiction as well as in historiography. His analysis of mode abounds in
too sweeping generalizations, following Hamburger's dichotomy of an ontological
difference between first-person and third-person narratives, and ascribing
to linguistic structures (and necessity) what is a matter of traditions
or conventions (and convenience). A quotation he draws from Northanger
Abbey is self-defeating: "... a great deal of [history] must be
invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts
and designs—the chief of this must be invention" (quoted in Löschnigg,
39). For Löschnigg, this shows that Jane Austen already knew "that
the presentation of a character's thoughts and feelings can serve as a criterion
to distinguish between factual and fictional discourse". But surely
it shows, too, that so-called "fictional" discourse and its modes
pervade the supposedly "factual" genre of history so that quite
often we will be hard put to tell between fact and fiction in history (as
Ricoeur has shown, factual/fictional does not equal truthful/untruthful).
Then Löschnigg abandons description and becomes prescriptive when he
argues that "a historian's account of a person's inner life should
either be accompanied by a 'perhaps' or a 'maybe' or, when there is reason
for more conclusive conjectures, a 'he/she must have thought'," and
should reserve free indirect discourse for the "sole grammatical locus"
reserved to it by Hamburger, namely "narrative literature"—which
leaves one wondering whether Lytton Strachey's biographies, which are being
chided here as insufficiently scrupulous in their use of f.i.d., are not
"narrative literature". In sum, Löschnigg's claim that focalization
presents "a decisive criterion in such a distinction" (i.e. fiction
vs. nonfiction) seems unwarranted. As to the analysis of "voice",
Löschnigg joins Genette (and Nünning, see below) as one of those
who think one can do away with "that eminently superfluous category,
the 'implied author'"—as if one did not need this concept and all of
the refinements and sub-divisions one can think of in order to account for
actual narrative communication. A review is not the appropriate context
for the refutation of such notions. Any informed reader will immediately
grasp that authors do manipulate their self-image, and that any belief that
a textual image of the author is "the author" tout court
is naive. In order to theorise criticism which addresses these problems
in illuminating ways, such as Maurice Couturier's La Figure de l'auteur
or Michael Wood's The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction,
we need authors, implied authors, unreliable authors, implied narrators
and more things than are dreamt of in many a narratological model. The conclusion
that "voice (...) does not necessarily become distinctive on the level
of discourse" is unsatisfactory, since it leaves out of the level of
"discourse" the very heart of the matter, the author's use of
literary discourse. One cannot but agree with Löschnigg that narratology
should address the question of the difference between fiction and nonfiction,
and contribute to its theorisation; but in order to do that we need a more
comprehensive narratology than the Genette/Hamburger models favoured by
Löschnigg.

In "Story Modalised, or the Grammar of Virtuality", Uri Margolin
contributes much of the material also published as "Of What Is Past,
Is Passing, or to Come: Temporality, Aspectuality, Modality, and the Nature
of Literary Narrative" in David Herman's volume on Narratologies
(a highly recommendable book for narratologists, incidentally). Basically,
Margolin deals with areas of "non-factivity" in literary narrative
(the disnarrated, counterfactuals, hypothetical inferences, possibilities
not actualised, etc.), as they occur in present-tense, past-tense or future-tense
narratives, as well as some speculations on the possible reasons for the
growth of non-factual narrative in contemporary fiction. He leaves largely
out of consideration, though, the major non-factual phenomenon, namely fictionality
itself, as he brackets the problem of truth within the narrated world-what
is factual or nonfactual for the narrating voice. Margolin might also want
to consider a more complex classification of narrating time, one which took
into account the author's time, and not just the narrator's. Nonetheless,
the analysis is often illuminating and especially fruitful in approaching
contemporary metafictions and experimental novels. Students in a postgraduate
seminar where I used both papers by Margolin as set texts thought them useful,
suggestive and readily applicable for analytical purposes. We also discussed
in the seminar Jon-K Adams's paper, "Order and Narrative", and
found there both interesting observations and muddled general notions. Adams
addresses the cognitive structure of anachronies, and points out that narrative
does not aim to establish an absolute chronology of all events, since many
temporal relations between the anachronical segments will be left indeterminate
as they are not cognitively relevant. Some good points in Adams's paper
are marred by a confusing discussion of the way plot is "destroyed"
if we restore chronological order (which any reading must do, we might argue,
and that in order to construct plot).

Ansgar Nünning's paper suggests "Reconceptualizing the Theory
and Generic Scope of Unreliable Narration." We should avoid postulating
"anthropomorphized" entities such as the implied author or the
unreliable narrator, and reinterpret unreliable narration in the context
of frame theory, as an interpretive strategy used by the reader (a definition
which does not account for the use of unreliable narrators as a deliberate
strategy on the part of the author). One wonders how the process of constructing
textual characters could avoid a measure of "anthropomorphization",
since it is human communication we are dealing with here, and any narrator,
whether he is an "anthropomorphic" character or not, derives in
the last analysis from the model of a human speaker. Nünning suggests,
furthermore, that "the implied author's norms are impossible to establish
and that the concept of the implied author is dispensable". Here I
can only refer the reader to Wayne Booth's works on the subject, and recall
that reading narrative fiction consists to a large extent in establishing
those norms; any given construction will be open to critical debate, but
reading without establishing them amounts to reading only superficial linguistic
aspects of the text, not the coherent narrative discourse of literature.
Of course Nünning's critique is based on a basic misunderstanding of
the notion of the implied author. The implied author is supposedly "voiceless"!
One wonders to whom we should attribute, then the overall act of discourse
of "writing a novel" or "a play". "To the real
author", Nünning would no doubt answer, but "implied author"
is a way of saying "real author as inferred from the work". The
ghostly and voiceless implied author attacked by Nünning is a man of
straw, a figment of the mind of critics who like him oppose the notion of
implied author "which is ill-defined"—as is the case here—"and
potentially misleading"—but then anything is potentially misleading
if you are easily misled. As to the unreliable narrator, a careful reading
of Nünning's third paragraph on page 69 shows that he does not understand
this notion. A discrepancy between a narrator's view and the reader's grasping
of the state of affairs seems to him a sufficient definition of unreliability—this
would make Homeric or Miltonic narration unreliable to me, for instance,
since my values are at odds with the narrator's. In this paragraph Nünning
is unable to differentiate unreliability from mere ideological discrepancy,
and no wonder, as he has jettisoned the overall values of the work, as distinct
from the narrator's, as a relevant third set of values. Note however that
the overall set of values of the work resurfaces in the following paragraph
(p. 69, par. 4)-a muddle, once again. As Nünning says, the limitations
of his question "Unreliable, compared to what?" "can be summed
up in one brief sentence": "unreliable, not compared to the implied
author's norms and values, but to the reader's or critic's preexisting conceptual
knowledge of the world and to his or her (usually unacknowledged) frames
of reference" (p. 81; sic). For Nünning, the term "unreliable
narrator" is not "structural", but "pragmatic"
(p. 74), a definition which shows that Nünning does not contemplate
the structure of a work as incorporating pragmatic elements-represented
pragmatic protocols which are therefore structural. The application of interpretive
frame theory can indeed result in a more adequate definition of the notions
of "implied author" or "unreliable narrator", but that
will hardly be the case if the analysis proceeds from a basic misunderstanding
of both concepts.

Manfred Jahn's "More Aspects of Focalisation: Refinements and Applications"
uses concepts drawn from cognitive science which provide many interesting
perspectives on concepts which have already been well studied; still, not
much is added to the initial formulations by Genette and Bal, apart from
some theoretical corollaries and the streamlining of the most useful central
notions which results from their being reformulated from an alternative
perspective. Bal's conception was already "cognitivist" enough,
even though it lacked the terminology of modern cognitive science. But there
is still much work to be done in the interface of narratology and cognitive
science, and this paper is recommended reading to any narratologist.

Gordon Collier's analysis of "Apparent Feature-Anomalies in Subjectivized
Third-Person Narration" is also inspired by frame analysis; it deals
with subtle effects of voice and perspective in the work of Patrick White,
with characters absorbing elements of third-person narration; it is a very
interesting paper on the analysis of the modalities of reference in represented
speech and thought. As is the case of other papers in the collection, this
one deals with exceptions, interstices and modulations of the more ordinary
or central narratological structures. Experimental or style-conscious fiction
figures prominently in most papers of this volume as an object of analysis,
as in most works on narratology. Thus, Elizabeth Deeds Ermath (in a paper
reprinted from EJES) analyzes some narratological consequences of
postmodern parody as it relates to the workings of the different levels
of the narrative text: style plays against plot; the voice- or perspective-building
categories modulate a story which is deliberately plotted along time-honoured
lines.

Monika Fludernik's "The Genderization of Narrative" deals with
problematic or ambiguous cases of sexual or generic identity in narrative
voice, analyzing the textual clues we use to determine gender identity,
including a survey of readers' responses and cross-linguistic grammatical
observations. This is an extremely interesting paper in many respects, although
the analysis is weakened by a partial neglect of the very point of the experimental
texts playing on generic ambiguity. Fludernik argues that the refractority
of novelists like Winterson in Written on the Body, "refusing
a very determinate gender allocation, ultimately destroys the interpretative
accessibility of the text, since any evaluation of the novel needs to first
establish the 'facts' of the plot, and these, in our cultural understanding,
crucially relate to the over-all schemata that we project on the text"
(171-72). But surely the point of these texts is to play with interpretive
accesibility-that is, they place the reader in a position in which s/he
is required to deconstruct preconceptions about gender, and it is that frame
of reference, one requiring a more complex reading and not a reading for
the plot, that makes the text accessible, even though some aspects of plot
or character will remain strategically inacessible. What I miss most from
the discussion is, once again, the higher-level discursive parameters: what
is the point of sexual or generic ambiguity in narrative? The answer would
have to consider the authors' sexual politics as well as the contemporary
feminist debates and the issue of gay and lesbian rights; these texts seem
to be much more ideologically driven than Fludernik's analysis suggests.
Such a reading, however, would work on the interface of narratology and
ideological critique, while Fludernik's interest is more strictly narratological.

Although strictures or disagreements are prominent in this review, many
of the articles are interesting, carefully written and rewarding; the volume
is well worth buying for any researcher interested in narratology, and deserves
a wider print run than the "250 exemplaires" of the copyright
page. The efforts of the editor and the convenor of the Debrecen narratology
panel to make these papers available deserve recognition. There are, I insist,
many untenable or mistaken notions in some papers, of the kind which should
not be allowed to survive a more "intrusive" editing. Still, I
am aware that the fact that I find in many papers so many things which I
consider to be downright mistaken does not reflect so much on the quality
of the volume as on the still undertheorized status of narratology, a field
of study with promising foundations in poetics, semiotics, pragmatics, linguistics
and cognitive science which, however, do not yet amount to a disciplinary
consensus on many seemingly basic issues.